Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to examine and explain social behavior in terms of evolution. It draws from disciplines including psychology, anthropology, zoology and population genetics. Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is allied to Darwinian anthropology, human behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology. Sociobiology investigates social behaviors such as mating patterns, territorial fights, pack hunting, the hive society of social insects, it argues that just as selection pressure led to animals evolving useful ways of interacting with the natural environment, so it led to the genetic evolution of advantageous social behavior. While the term "sociobiology" originated at least as early as the 1940s, the concept did not gain major recognition until the publication of E. O. Wilson's book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975; the new field became the subject of controversy. Critics, led by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, argued that genes played a role in human behavior, but that traits such as aggressiveness could be explained by social environment rather than by biology.

Sociobiologists responded by pointing to the complex relationship between nurture. E. O. Wilson defined sociobiology as "the extension of population biology and evolutionary theory to social organization". Sociobiology is based on the premise that some behaviors are at least inherited and can be affected by natural selection, it begins with the idea that behaviors have evolved over time, similar to the way that physical traits are thought to have evolved. It predicts that animals will act in ways that have proven to be evolutionarily successful over time; this can, among other things, result in the formation of complex social processes conducive to evolutionary fitness. The discipline seeks to explain behavior as a product of natural selection. Behavior is therefore seen as an effort to preserve one's genes in the population. Inherent in sociobiological reasoning is the idea that certain genes or gene combinations that influence particular behavioral traits can be inherited from generation to generation.

For example, newly dominant male lions kill cubs in the pride that they did not sire. This behavior is adaptive because killing the cubs eliminates competition for their own offspring and causes the nursing females to come into heat faster, thus allowing more of his genes to enter into the population. Sociobiologists would view this instinctual cub-killing behavior as being inherited through the genes of reproducing male lions, whereas non-killing behavior may have died out as those lions were less successful in reproducing; the philosopher of biologyDaniel Dennett suggested that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes was the first sociobiologist, arguing that in his 1651 book Leviathan Hobbes had explained the origins of morals in human society from an amoral sociobiological perspective. The geneticist of animal behavior John Paul Scott coined the word sociobiology at a 1948 conference on genetics and social behaviour which called for a conjoint development of field and laboratory studies in animal behavior research.

With John Paul Scott's organizational efforts, a "Section of Animal Behavior and Sociobiology" of the ESA was created in 1956, which became a Division of Animal Behavior of the American Society of Zoology in 1958. In 1956, E. O. Wilson came in contact this emerging sociobiology through his PhD student Stuart A. Altmann, in close relation with the participants to the 1948 conference. Altmann developed his own brand of sociobiology to study the social behavior of rhesus macaques, using statistics, was hired as a "sociobiologist" at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in 1965. Wilson's sociobiology is different from John Paul Scott's or Altmann's, insofar as he drew on mathematical models of social behavior centered on the maximisation of the genetic fitness by W. D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, John Maynard Smith, George R. Price; the three sociobiologies by Scott and Wilson have in common to place naturalist studies at the core of the research on animal social behavior and by drawing alliances with emerging research methodologies, at a time when "biology in the field" was threatened to be made old-fashioned by "modern" practices of science.

Once a specialist term, "sociobiology" became known in 1975 when Wilson published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which sparked an intense controversy. Since "sociobiology" has been equated with Wilson's vision; the book pioneered and popularized the attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviors such as altruism and nurturance in ants and other Hymenoptera, but in other animals. However, the influence of evolution on behavior has been of interest to biologists and philosophers since soon after the discovery of evolution itself. Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, written in the early 1890s, is a popular example; the final chapter of the book is devoted to sociobiological explanations of human behavior, Wilson wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book, On Human Nature, that addressed human behavior specifically. Edward H. Hagen writes in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology that sociobiology is, despite the public controversy regarding the applications to humans, "one of the scientific triumphs of the twentieth century."

"Sociobiology is now part of the core research and curriculum of all biology departments, it is a foundation of the work of all field biologists" Sociobiological research on nonhuman organisms has increased dramatic